MCCF Summer News

August 2024

Greetings MCCF Friends,

The wharf has been a flurry of activity this summer, with building and dock repair crews, fishermen, sailors, students, visiting scientists and volunteers everywhere. We are ever grateful for all the energy and can-do attitude as we rise to the tests of resilience. Please join me in celebrating the incredible abundance and natural wealth of our coastal region, our seafood, our gardens, our farms. Every day, I am reminded of how special Maine is and how special our coastal communities are. We are quirky, cool, and unique. Our salty character is our heritage. Thank you for you supporting our mission to preserve this heritage, and I'm proud to share highlights of our work below and through our redesigned website full of useful resources, photos and deeper dives into our programs and how to get involved.

-Alexa Dayton

Executive Director

Alewife Day 2024 Attracts Over 300 Attendees

Thanks to the many volunteers and partners, we deployed alewife aka river herring monitoring and biological sampling collection efforts at Walker, Frost, Wights, Parker and Pierce ponds. It was another year of good runs with record or near record returns at all locations. Fish counting cameras helped us at Frost and Parker ponds and one of our cameras helped count Downeast runs too. A whopping 9 schools were involved this year, and one of the events attracted 150 students and 30 adults! Thanks to recent new funding we were also able to create a curriculum to guide the planning on these field trip events and offering more formal in-school activities around river herring. Learn more here

Scallop Babies!

Each spring, fishermen help us retrieve as many as 20-long lines that have been submerged offshore over winter, ready to catch baby scallop settlers that float by, a truly hit or miss affair. We process and shake down the mesh bags that dangle on these long lines to see how many baby scallops settlers landed. They're tiny! Yet with this information we can gauge how year-over-year scallop populations are doing, i.e. an index of abundance. Students and scientists from Islesboro, Hurricane Island Center for Science Leadership and Colby College contributed their help and everyone learned hands-on to identify, collect and count baby scallops. This work is important because diversification of Maine’s fisheries has many connections between the wild and captured harvesting techniques and methods, and animal husbandry underlies both of these industries. One of the questions we ask is how much connection there is between spat and seed production of the wild scallop stocks and the cultured crops, such as Marsden Brewer's farm. Check out the research.

Lobster Gear Innovation: It Takes a Village

Lobster gear innovation is under way, and it could be going really high-tech for some fishermen. It remains difficult to forecast who will need to adopt new gear, when, and how. But the implementation timeline is tight, and rule-making begins Oct 2025, which is right around the corner. Whale mortality over the next year will impact the outcomes of the management plans for lobster, as risk models are updated. The protection plans for whales looks like it will be through the creation of marine closure areas, such as static seasonal closures as well as dynamic area closures. At this time, it appears that fisherman’s access to these closed areas will be allowed through use of lobster gear with minimal vertical lines and buoys, of which there are many styles being tested. Recently awarded NFWF funding has made possible the Maine Innovative Gear Library, a DMR led project with many collaborators along the coast. MCCF's role is to host adaptive gear at our facility, provide demo and make these units available to local industry members for trials - and then MCCF will listen to the feedback and act on it. Innovation in fishing gear is a timeless activity, and a part of being a fisherman. With help of the industry including Skippers Program students, we are fostering the evolution of gear as generations of fishermen have done before. More info coming soon!

Thanks to donor and public support, we more than doubled the square footage available for our educational marine museum, a service offered free to the public and an exciting destination contributing to the vitality of the Stonington Main Street district. We’ve painted, opened up new space in our building, and created a retail area for gifts and MCCF merchandise. We've got a lot to learn! This winter, thanks to a recently announced Institute of Museum and Library Sciences planning grant, we’re getting ready to design and create the new discovery wharf interactive exhibits for summer 2025. The new space will tell our stories and provide a unique kind of education through analog play, world-class videos and other artful and unique displays. For now, our newly installed Captains' Wheel is a very popular addition, and takers in our race to get into a safety suit fast will agree - they are Gumby! Check out the visitor testimonials.

Join us for our fundraiser event and show your support!

Coastal Fisheries Fanfare TOMORROW Tuesday, August 20th

Special thanks to our amazing Board of Directors:

Chair: Marsden Brewer, Vice Chair: Dave Thomas, Secretary: Nancy Knowlton, Treasurer: Michelle Carter, Chris Brown, Dwight Carver, Libby Jewett, Nathaniel Lane, Jim Markos, Sal McCloskey, Derek McCombs, John McMillan, Dana Morse, Charles Rudelitch, Joan Sorensen, David Tarr, Steve Train, and Carl Wilson